"lumbering our minds with literature..."

"Somewhere between prayer and revolution....:"

"This is what we were all doing, lumbering our minds with literature that only served to cloud the really vital situation spread before our eyes...I am simply smothered and sickened with advantages. It is like eating a sweet dessert the first thing in the morning. This, then, was the difficulty, this sweet dessert in the morning and the assumption that the sheltered, educated girl has nothing to do with the bitter poverty and the social maladjustment which is all around her, and which, after all, cannot be concealed, for it breaks through poetry and literature in a burning tide which overwhelms her." -Jane Addams, Twenty Years at Hull-House







Tuesday, July 20, 2010

Kangaroos

Sometimes I'm really worried about how children will fit into our value system.

I know people don't appreciate our Asher/child comparison, but she is all that we are keeping alive right now. Asher has terrible allergies and is basically miserable all summer. The vet put her on a special diet. I explained our eating habits to our vet, and she put her on a fish based diet. Asher refused to eat the fish diet, though. I tried explaining to her that we generally feel less bad for fish than mammals and that there is a higher chance that they are wild caught than that the other meat is fairly treated. I tried mixing it with wet fish food, and she sucked off the wet food and spit the dry food all over the kitchen floor. So I went back to the vet and asked her if there is another option. There is another allergy option, and that is a dog food made entirely up of kangaroo meat. Apparently, dogs in America don't usually eat kangaroos, so it allows them to avoid all possible food allergies they might have developed.

Asher LOVES the kangaroo diet. So basically, Brian and I have turned down about a zillion delicious hot dogs this summer, but our dog is eating characters from Winnie the Pooh.

I'm trying to imagine convincing our future children that they should eat Krema peanut butter because it is local and doesn't have high fructose corn syrup. Or trying to explain why they shouldn't eat at McDonalds. I have a feeling that there are a lot of kangaroos in my future.